In the wake of the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Life asked Parks to go to Alabama and document the racial tensions entrenched there. He would compare his findings with his own troubled childhood in Fort Scott, Kansas, and with the relatively progressive and integrated life he had enjoyed in Europe.

Arriving in Mobile in the summer of 1956, Parks was met by two men: Sam Yette, a young Black reporter who had grown up there and was now attending a northern college, and the white chief of one of Life’s southern bureaus. In his memoirs and interviews, Parks magnanimously refers to this man simply as “Freddie,” in order to conceal his real identity. Revealing it, Parks feared, might have resulted in violence against both Freddie and his family.

The assignment encountered challenges from the outset. Freddie, who was supposed to as act as handler for Parks and Yette as they searched for their story, seemed to have his own agenda. He told Parks that there was not enough segregation in Alabama to merit a Life story. Then he gave Parks and Yette the name of a man who was to protect them in case of trouble. When the two discovered that this intended bodyguard was the head of the local White Citizens’ Council, “a group as distinguished for their hatred of Blacks as the Ku Klux Klan” (To Smile in Autumn, 1979), they quickly left via back roads. After reconvening with Freddie, who admitted his “error,” Parks began to make progress. He soon identified one of the major subjects of the photo essay: Willie Causey, a husband and the father of five who pieced together a meager livelihood cutting wood and sharecropping. For a Black family in Alabama, the Causeys had reached a certain level of financial success, exemplified by a secondhand refrigerator and the Chevrolet sedan that Willie and his wife, Allie, an elementary school teacher, had slowly saved enough money to buy.